Erika D. Smith: Neighborhood forum can help us learn from each other

Feb. 16, 2013

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I'll never forget the first real community advocate I met in Indianapolis. She was an older woman, perhaps in her late 60s, and had spent the last year trying to get more residents in her Southside neighborhood engaged in a plan to attract new businesses. It was a thankless job, she said, because only a handful of people seemed to care.

Not long after that, I met another community advocate, this one from the Eastside. This woman, also in her 60s, told me about the days when almost no one wanted to help get the struggling neighborhood back on its feet. Slowly, though, she had managed to convince residents to care again.

Why, I wondered, had these two women never met? One woman could clearly learn so much from the other woman.

Two years later, here's what I know to be true in Indianapolis because I've seen it over and over again: First, most people want to live in a neighborhood that they like and, if asked in the right way, most are willing to put in the work to make their surroundings safer, prettier and livelier. Second, residents are constantly reinventing the wheel. At this very moment, Hoosiers on one side of the city are haphazardly working on a problem that Hoosiers on the other side of the city have already solved. Yet, they never talk to each other because one group doesn't know the other group exists.

This has to change. We're wasting time, resources and energy.

So that's why I'm pretty excited about a new Web service from Indianapolis-based Angie's List called Band of Neighbors. It's a free, private forum designed to help residents connect with one another so they can share information and resources.

Angie Hicks, the founder of Angie's List, envisions residents using the service to discuss simple stuff, such as a dog that's barking too much at night or an upcoming garage sale or a new schedule for trash collection.

That's because, for the moment anyway, Band of Neighbors is designed for communication within neighborhoods, not communication between neighborhoods.

When you sign up for an account, you must register with a valid address to access the private forum for a particular neighborhood. And because it is new, Band of Neighbors is only available in Indianapolis; Columbus, Ohio; San Francisco; and Washington, D.C.

I understand why Hicks set it up this way. She sees Band of Neighbors as an extension of the core Angie's List business -- scores of shareable consumer reviews on local contractors and service providers.

"It's similar in that our goal has always been to facilitate information and conversation among consumers," she said. "At our very heart, this is the same kind of service we always want to provide."

But from where I sit, Band of Neighbors could one day be so much more.

Imagine if residents in, say, Fountain Square could tell residents on the Far Eastside how they managed to cut down on the amount of graffiti on abandoned buildings. Or imagine if residents on the Near Northside could tell residents on the Eastside how they managed to reduce the number of break-ins.

This would mean we wouldn't have to solve a problem 25 times from scratch. We could solve it once and modify it. Just imagine how much money and how many headaches that could save.

I did ask Hicks about this and she said such a service is "potentially down the road."

In the meantime, she said there are plenty of opportunities for analyzing common concerns and themes across neighborhoods.

"It's an opportunity to educate people in the same way we look at reviews for service companies," she said. "These categories are the most complained about, these are the most praised."